What It's Like to Be in an Open Marriage: My First Time Having a Fling

This couldn’t be more perfect. I’m in Jamaica. I’m on a Jet Ski. The two arms tightly wrapped around my waist belong to a lithe, blue-eyed twentysomething woman, her wavy hair slicked to her gorgeous face with sea spray. She’s squealing with excitement as we skim across the bay to a secluded cove. I turn off the engine; we both dive into the ocean, swim toward each other, and embrace as we bob in the water, then kiss.

How is my wife going to react, I wonder, when I tell her about this? The truth is, in that moment I was overcome with love for my wife—the funny, stubborn, strong, and beautiful woman I’d married just 10 months earlier. The woman who’d told me, even encouraged me, to have moments like this. Without her.

Yes, an open marriage—the freedom to hook up with other people when the mood struck—was Maria’s idea. (She’s not that much of an anomaly, actually: Almost 20 percent of women in a Glamour survey said they’d consider some form of open relationship.) Maria had first proposed the arrangement to me during our initial, long-distance phase. And by proposed, I mean that she had a one-night stand with another guy, then guilelessly told me all about it over the phone. I was horrified by the news—but, when I was honest with myself, also incredibly turned on by her sense of adventure. Still not sure our relationship was on solid footing, though, I suggested that we table the motion. I secretly hoped that her interest in nonmonogamy would pass.

We didn’t talk about it again until the following year, around the time of our wedding. Shortly before tying the knot, I told Maria that I thought our relationship was strong enough to handle some...exploration, if that’s what she still wanted. Maria seemed touched by my acceptance of her ideal married scenario. But while our marriage was theoretically open from the beginning, as newlyweds neither of us was in a hurry to put that theory to the test.

A few months in, on my business trip to Jamaica, I decided there was no better place to give this thing a whirl. Maria even helped seed the idea in my mind.

“Any cute girls there?” she asked when we spoke on the phone the night I arrived.

“There is one I sort of like talking with.” “Are you going to hook up with her?”

I couldn’t help thinking that I was walking into a trap. “Um...would that be OK? I mean, I have no idea if she’s up for it, so...”

“Sure,” she chirped, and changed the subject to bank charges I’d carelessly accrued; a cold splash of domesticity as things were heating up in a tropical paradise.

In the cove, Dominique and I kissed. She had been intrigued when I told her about my untested open marriage and probed me about how this had all come about, and how I’d feel when Maria cashed in her cheating chips. The truth was, I had no idea. But Maria would be the first of us to deal with hearing about her life partner’s sexual adventures. (We’d agreed on full disclosure, as opposed to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.) As Dominique and I feverishly groped at each other in the water, a number of factors—drowning, being arrested for public indecency—got me thinking that my first extramarital fling should be conducted in a bed. And it was.

The next morning I was scared to tell Maria. Being cool with your partner having sex with someone in theory is one thing; how she’d react once I’d crossed the Rubicon had yet to be tested. When I called I said, “So I did hook up with that girl last night.”

Two Mississippis elapsed before she said anything. I grew worried.

“Really?” she said. “Um...wow!” Maria didn’t push me to give her a play-by-play, so I kept the dirty details to myself.

And that was that. Dominique left for New York the next day. She and I have spo- radically kept in touch on Facebook and have even met up for drinks—just drinks— when we found ourselves in the same city.

And when I came home, I was full of gratitude for my wife. Sex with Maria was intense and intimate. My experience, and Maria’s own two months later, caused us to see each other and our relationship in a new, more adventurous light.

Now Maria and I have been married for six years, and we’ve had several sexual trysts with other people. I believe our relationship is stronger for it: Being sexually open means there’s no need to lie, no cause to repress what we want to do, and that honesty informs all other areas of our relationship. If you had told me that I would be in an open marriage before I met Maria, I wouldn’t have believed you. Would this work for everyone? No. But for me and Maria, it’s perfectly right.

Excerpted from our February 2014 Issue. Subscribe now for instant access to the digital edition to read more of the "My First Time..." essays.

Grant Stoddard is the author of Working Stiff: The Misadventures of an Accidental Sexpert.